A Historical Study on Syntactic Structures in German

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From the modern period on, German had gradually become a visual and literary language out of an auditory and colloquial one in the medieval period. This study aims to describe these changes, especially changes in syntactic structures from the viewpointof text linguistics and pragmatics. The data used here are from the Early New High German text corpus at the University of Bonn, collected and classified by genre and period. The results of this study can be summarized as below :1) In the ENHG,the finite verb had taken its position as in the NHG,and the verbal brace construction had already come into being. Compared with the NHG,however, the word order was still considerably free as frequent exbraciations show.2) Several principles concerning the word order were observed : (a) A exbraciated phase ist not necessarily a prepositional one. Besides, the exbraciation had no relation to the distiction between complemtnt and adjunct. (b) finitte verb and infinitives are located to divide the words and phrases into appropriate length. (c) The divided words and phrases function to produce rhythm. (d) Those words and phrases are arranged along the time axis, according to the principles of information trasmission. The more important ones are, the more backward they are.3) With regard to exbraciation, the influence of Latin ist not confirmed, and any inclination by Textsorten is not seen.4) Sentence structures are simple, and paratactic ones are more frequent than hypotactic ones.5) In 16th century, the conjunction 'wande', which had meant causes and reasons, had diverged into 'weil' and 'denn'. The former epresses a causal relationship betwenn events, the latter expresses grounds for one's assertion. These differentiated functions proposed new ways cnstruct text.6) It is assumed to be in 16th century that the word order changes from the one based on auditory and colloquial rules to the one on visual and literary rules.